10.10.2005

Four vehicles finish in $2 million robot race

Four robotic vehicles finished a Pentagon-sponsored race across the Mojave desert Saturday and achieved a technological milestone by conquering steep drop-offs, obstacles and tunnels over a rugged 132-mile course without a single human command.

The vehicles, guided by sophisticated software, gave scientists hope that robots could one day wage battles without endangering soldiers.

This is a huge surprise. Obviously, this much improvement in one year implies either a software breakthrough or an easier course. I'm guessing the latter, as it seems very unlikely that multiple contestants would benefit from unpublicized software breakthroughs in the same year. If anyone can confirm why that did happen, please tell me why this year rather than last year.

Self-driving cars will be a reality much sooner than people would have thought.

Nearly every truck will be able to drive itself as well. This means 24x7 long-distance trucking and the elimination of up to 1 million truck driving jobs.

Automatic taxis that drive themselves at much lower cost than current taxis. This will also eliminate several hundred thousand jobs.

Improved autopilots in airplanes, meaning that the process of eliminating pilots will speed up. Another half million jobs are on the line.

New types of vehicles and businesses that may not be possible today. For example, automatic delivery vehicles may be possible.

And lets not forget DARPA's goal of automated warfare, where robots are doing everything on the battlefield.

Can anyone truely say that any of the above are bad? I would love for my car to drive me around while I sleep, or for fewer soldier to die from IEDs. Concerning the loss of trucking and delivery jobs- good riddance. If there were ever jobs that wasted human potential, these are them. These are truely mindless jobs. Keeping them open when technology could take care of them would be like bringing thousands of welders back into car factories to make the same weld, day after day, forever.

I wonder how much more engineering development is required to run on public roads? In the Grand Challenge, the only other moving objects to contend with were other robots carefully programmed to avoid obsticals. On the roads, you have to contend with other cars, some driven by drunks and idiots...

Although the statement above no doubt sounds controversial, the actual path to a driverless future needn't sound so Orwellian. If automated vehicles become safer than human operated ones, the market -- and lawsuits -- will inexorably lead us in that direction.

Governments haven't been able to significantly improve unemployment rates in the past four decades. So it's doubtful that they'll find solutions once the robots slowly start "taking over" in the next ten years or so.

Hey, I think this would make us freer. I want this single law so we can do away with a significant number of things I find very distasteful: DUI, Speeding, driver licenses, less-than-optimal use of law enforcement, the huge bureaucracy meant to handle all of this, etc...

It frees us of both the laws and the problems today's laws fail to solve. I’m willing to give up driving and spend the time going to and from work reading, surfing the ‘net, or watching TV for that. You, of course, are free to disagree.

Using self-driving cars as weapons isn't really going to be any more likely than using cars as weapons is today. After all, the terrorists love to kill themselves as well as killing everyone else.

Besides, reprogramming your car to cause accidents is likely to be more far more difficult than killing people in some other way.

As far as how will small towns survive on tax dollars alone, well your comment just shows how little speeding violations have to do with controlling speeding. I guess they'll just have to increase the local property tax or something else...

Last year on 3.16.2004 on this site, when DARPA entrants failed, the site owner suggested that DARPA will be a success in around 2012 due to Moore's Law, but it seems we are 7 years early: http://roboticnation.blogspot.com/2004_03_01_roboticnation_archive.html